Nigel Farage’s interview in last Saturday’s Times is somewhat revealing and very disturbing.
We seem to have reached the stage where he feels able to say the quiet part out loud, where he confirms the suspicions that many of the decent folk of the UK have had for some time: that there are few limits to the moral depravity he is prepared to sink to in order to rile up hatred in the UK to his advantage.
Firstly, if he became Prime Minister, he plans to pull the UK out of many international agreements.
These include:
Yes, it seems he does not want to align the UK with being against human trafficking or torture. The first you would think should be of paramount concern to this person so concerned with “small boats”. The second you would think should be of paramount concern to anyone who hasn’t truly lost all vestige of humanity.
More locally, he also intends to disband the UK’s Human Rights Act. And, to the extent that he intends to replace it with anything, it won’t be anything that guarantees your human rights – the idea of which he seems to think is somehow a negative because human rights in his view are “state-given”. Apparently he sees the role of the state as solely to limit your freedoms and punish you . Not to help protect you, your dignity, your freedoms and indeed your life.
For be in no doubt: whilst he will use examples of various types of immigrants in the rare cases where he bothers trying to justify his lunatic ideas, these laws are not in place to protect only immigrants. If you are whatever Farage would accept as a being a 100% native British citizen then the exact same laws are what protects your rights too.
If Farage disbands these laws, you will lose rights and freedoms.
- Your right to not be tortured? It’s guaranteed by article 3 of the UK Human Rights Act
- Rights to a fair trial, of not being punished unlawfully? Article 6 and 7 of the act.
- Right to freedom? Of thoughts, belief, religion, expression, assembly, to marry – the UK HRA, article 9, 10, 11 & 12.
- Right to privacy? The UK HRA article 8.
and so on.
Farage is proposing to strip the very legislation that enables your freedoms, quality of life and privacy, and that of your loved ones.
In withdrawing us from the world stage he will continue in his perverse ambition to make Britain weaker, poorer, less powerful; all in the name of making it crueller.
This is nothing new. This unpatriotic chancer was one of the “masterminds” behind Brexit which the majority of the UK agrees made our country, and us, its people, weaker, poorer and less influential on the world stage. We have become rule takers, not rule makers. Immigration has sored. As has poverty. The NHS seems to be in a chronic decline. Essentially, the exact reverse of what Farage promised would come as “Brexit bonus” has come to the fore, and the vast majority of us are substantially worse off as a result.
Even if you support the ethos behind some of his policies, you would almost certainly not want this dangerous and incompetent fool to get his hands anywhere near the levers of power. He has shown he cannot deliver what he promises – probably because he has no real intention of doing so. He just wants to maintain his vast wealth, increasing power, fame and ability to appear on whichever TV show he likes.
Immigration is of course the area in which his avaricious cruelty is brought most to the fore.
His “plans” include:
…the arrest of asylum seekers on arrival, automatic detention and forced deportation, with no right of appeal, to countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea.
There are plans for deals with third countries such as Rwanda, a “fallback” option of sending people to British overseas territories such as Ascension Island…
He will require the wide sharing of our personal data in order to help them do this.
The NHS, HM Revenue & Customs and the DVLA will be required to share data automatically so illegal immigrants can be tracked down and arrested.
At best this will lead to a rise in anyone who could be perceived as an “illegal immigrant” to avoid seeking healthcare, paying their taxes or getting a driving license, with all the consequent problems off pushing people into the illegal economy and induce extra cost for the tax-payer.
But it also feels very likely to end up with the data of all of us, immigrants or otherwise, being used for purposes we dislike or subject to leaks and hacks. The British public does not in general appear to like their health data being shared, even when it’s for well-meaning reasons that do not involve trying to deport you.
In Farage’s words:
The aim of this legislation is mass deportations
People entering the UK in order to claim asylum “illegally” (and note: there is currently no real legal way for someone to claim asylum – so he is basically referring to all asylum seekers) would be immediately arrested, temporarily detained on some hastily constructed ex-RAF-base holding pen and then shipped off.
“They have no right to claim asylum,” he says. “They would be arrested and detained.”
A total abrogation of responsibility, with cruel and unusual consequences.
Why is this needed? Well, his excuse is that asylum seekers are in general the scum of the earth, rather than the reality of being often desperate people fleeing from a tortuous trauma of course.
You have these young men from different cultures, Afghans being perhaps the worst example, who are literally free at licence to go out, work in the criminal economy and commit crimes…
This is of course an absolute lie. No-one is free to work in the criminal economy and commit crimes. He and his corrupt buddies may not have noticed – but our country has laws. And if you are caught committing crimes then you are subject to them, no matter your status.
You do not get a “commit murder without penalty” card just because you weren’t born in Britain. In fact the only real difference is that a wider array of punishments are available to you if you are a foreign national such as an asylum seeker – mostly involving being removed from the country,.
In fact one of the responsibilities explicitly mandated by the Refugee Convention that Farage wants to remove us from is that refugees must “abide by the national laws of the contracting states”.
After all, a much-overlooked fact is that the only reason you know about the tiny number of cases where it has been alleged in recent times that an asylum seeker committed a crime is because they are being investigated and making their way through the British legal system under the full force of the existing British law.
We don’t need special magical laws against migrants committing crimes because we already have laws against anyone committing crimes.
After a stint in the pre-fab camps, Farage envisions the survivors being deported to third-party countries. Such as?
He wants to sign deals with countries such as Afghanistan and Eritrea, despotic regimes with dire human rights records.
Yes, Afghanistan. As in, the place ruled by the Taliban. The group famed for their “public executions and torture“.
But what of the risk of people being killed or tortured if they are sent back to their country of origin? The Taliban are unlikely to look kindly on people who have fled.
asks the interviewer, quite reasonably.
And now perhaps we see one of the reasons why he wants to extract the UK away from the laws on torture.
“I’m really sorry, but we can’t be responsible for everything that happens in the whole of the world”
Farage responds, far less reasonably.
No-one is particularly asking him to be responsible for what happens in the rest of the world, although people may well have views on the morality of that position. But, if he wants to become PM, we should be asking him to take responsibility for what wants to make his own country do; for what will be done in our name.
Britain sending asylum seekers to places where we know they may be tortured is Britain taking an action. Why on Earth does he want us to abandon the convention against torture if Britain isn’t implicated in his plans?
If there’s a few immigrants he can’t immediately send to these kind of places then, well, he wants to resurrect the totally failed, probably illegal and much ridiculed Rwanda deportation plan that the last Conservative administration had.
He is open to reviving the Conservative Party’s Rwanda plan
As a reminder, the Rwanda scheme cost the tax-payer £700 million and managed in the end to have gotten 4 – yes, four – people to leave the country. This does not seem very DOGE-aligned, even if it was moral, legal and he actually had the ability to make it work; which based on his past history he clearly does not.
Or failing even that, he might accept sending asylum seekers to the British Overseas Territories, such as Ascension Island, as a last resort
But wouldn’t some of this require the other countries to agree to take Britain’s small share of the asylum seeking population? Well, yes, obviously, but apparently he thinks we’ll be able to bully them into it.
Here he is, back channelling his hero, Donald Trump.
“We have enormous muscle on these things,” he says. “We can be nice to people, we can be nice to other countries, or we can be very tough to other countries.
But all the diplomatic levers that we have, if we have to use them, on visas, on trade, sanctions … I mean, Trump has proved this point quite comprehensively.”
Apparently forgetting the fact that part of the US’s considerable ability to seemingly bend some countries to its will (at incredible expense to the weakening US itself) comes from the fact it is such a big player on the world stage.
Farage’s own Brexit has lessened the wealth, trade, power and influence of the UK. Many countries have rather less to fear from the UK implementing whatever self-harm policies he has in mind that being shut out of the US economy, services, and so on.
It’s part of the empty-headed Reform technique of stealing US policies verbatim, without realising that they do not themselves in fact live or campaign to govern in the US. It may have escaped the attention of someone who spends far more time gladhanding his rich US pals and contributing to the American economy than helping members of his own UK constituency, but the UK is a different country to the US, with different needs and different abilities.
This is why they ran some council election campaigns on a plan of sacking all council DEI officers when in fact there were none to sack. Why they ran on closing down low traffic neighbourhoods in areas where there were none to close.
Anyway, to conclude:
“…look, I can’t be responsible for despotic regimes all over the world”
he says.
But we can and must hold him responsible for the despotic regime him and his big-business cronies seem to want to create in my home country, the United Kingdom.
